Chapter 23 - THE FEVERED CONFESSION
The blood loss had triggered a violent fever.
Elena had managed to wrap Luca's shoulder in tight, compression bandages, temporarily halting the hemorrhage, but his body was burning up. He lay propped against a stack of wooden crates, his head tilted back, chest rising and falling in erratic rhythms. The rhythmic hiss of the thermal lance against the outside door vibrated through the metal frame, a countdown to their execution.
Elena soaked a clean cloth in water from an emergency canteen, gently dabbing the sweat from his forehead and neck.
Luca’s hand shot out with sudden, feverish speed, his grip closing around her wrist. It wasn't the measured grip of a mafia don; it was the desperate grasp of a drowning man.
"You shouldn't have kissed me," he murmured, his pupils dilated, his mind drifting in the liminal space between consciousness and delirium. "Four days... only four days in my house, and you looked at me as if I were a man worthy of gentleness."
Elena froze, the damp cloth hovering in the air. "Luca, you have a fever. Rest."
"No," he growled softly, pulling her an inch closer until she could feel the heat radiating from his face. "When you touched my cheek... when your lips pressed against my skin... it broke something inside me, Elena. It tore open a door I spent fifteen years keeping locked."
Her breath hitched in her throat. "That's why you hit the wall? Because you were angry?"
"Because I was terrified," he confessed, the truth tearing out of him stripped of pride. "A man like me cannot afford tenderness. Tenderness is a blade that slips between the ribs when you're not looking. I wanted to destroy you for making me feel human. And now..." He let out a harsh, self-deprecating laugh that ended in a wince. "Now you are the only reason I am fighting to keep breathing."
Elena looked down at him, her heart thumping against her ribs with terrifying force. In the crimson twilight of the bunker, the ruthless king of the underworld was stripped bare, bleeding, raw, and completely at her mercy.
"You're not going to die here, Luca," she whispered, leaning down until her forehead gently rested against his uninjured temple. "I won't let them have you."
A loud bang echoed from the door. A spark of white-hot molten metal dripped from the upper seam of the blast door. The torch was already cutting through the outer layer.
Luca blinked, the fever receding slightly as his lethal instincts reasserted themselves. He glanced toward the surveillance monitors mounted above the central desk.
May you like
"Elena," he said, his voice dropping into cold, crystalline focus. "Look at the screen."
***
